


101. several deep breaths

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [266]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-23
Updated: 2017-03-23
Packaged: 2018-10-09 14:02:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10413795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Mermaids aren’t supposed to have families, not really. They come into the world and they eat everything around them, because the center of a mermaid is hunger. But humans have a word that is something likesisters. That's what Sarah says they are. And if that's what Sarah says they are, Helena believes her.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [warning: gore, reference to cannibalism, animal death]

Up above the water, nothing tastes real. Helena keeps having to remember to let her nostrils open, and breathe through those instead; the tastes are fainter through her nose, her body complaining from too much oxygen. She keeps her head above water anyways, tail thrashing to keep her afloat. She’s scenting.

When something bleeds, under the water, you can taste it from a whole night’s swim away. It tastes like something unraveling on your tongue, like the way anemones open or how skin splits when you sink your teeth into it. Up above the water Helena can’t taste anything. Something could be bleeding on the shoreline and she wouldn’t know. How do humans live like this? How can you go your whole life without _knowing?_

Well. Helena is going to find out.

When she stumbles onto the sand, it’s on feet. It hurts. Nothing tastes like blood at all.

\--

Sarah taught Helena to swim, because Sarah figured it out first. She held Helena’s hands as they caught riptides, used them to move forwards and forwards. Sarah laughed, and Helena laughed too once she figured out the workings of it.

Mermaids aren’t supposed to have families, not really. They come into the world and they eat everything around them, because the center of a mermaid is hunger. But when Sarah was born she didn’t eat any of their other siblings; she shrank back against a rock, and watched them with wide eyes. Helena had to eat all the others, just to protect them. She ate the eggs. She would have eaten their mother, but she was already gone.

Helena didn’t eat Sarah. Sarah didn’t cower from Helena.

Humans have a word that is something like _sisters_. At least, that’s what Sarah says. If Sarah says that’s what the two of them are, Helena believes her.

\--

Sarah didn’t eat any of the others. Maybe that was the first sign that she wouldn’t ever want this.

Sarah was always better at singing boys down than Helena was; she knew longing better than Helena did. Helena knew being hungry but she didn’t know _longing_ , because she was happy. She’s always been happy, with Sarah, with the ocean so big and unknowable they could spend a lifetime trying to solve it and never be able to. But Sarah – Sarah crooned to humans songs about wanting, and wishing, and not-having. And then the men leapt, because they wanted to be whole, because they wanted to stop being the things that they were.

And Sarah didn’t eat them. Helena kept trying to make her eat them, but she wouldn’t. She just watched them drown. Sad. Like she was disappointed.

\--

“I’m going to run away,” Sarah said, as if Helena understood the word _run_.

\--

There are no footprints in the sand, and Helena hates standing. Helena hates sand. Helena hates the sun, and feet, and the way her hair is suddenly in her face and on her shoulders. Helena hates her stupid blunt little teeth.

(Shape-changing is easy magic. Barely even magic. This isn’t a stupid story: there was no need to pay a price for it.)

(Sarah didn’t have to pay a price for it. Helena paid the price for Sarah, because she woke up and Sarah was gone.)

When hum—when people see her, they open their mouths very wide – like they’re showing off their teeth, showing Helena that they’re proud of them. Stupid. Stupid stupid. Teeth like that can’t rip through anything. This is probably why people have siblings: when all those eggs come tumbling out, each person-baby spends days just gnawing their way through the membrane.

Helena bares her own teeth back, and all the people look away. They are wearing things on their bodies. Helena hates them. When a mermaid gets caught in a net, she bites her way out. She doesn’t leave it on.

“I’m looking for my sister,” she says, and no one answers her. They just stare. She says it again, trills it off her stupid blunt tongue and her stupid blunt teeth – the high notes don’t ring true out of the water, but it echoes alright. Maybe _sister_ isn’t a human word. Maybe that’s why they don’t get it.

The people blink at her and spit rocks out of their teeth. Each noise is its own separate chunk and they all land heavy, like boulders. Oh. People here can’t even _speak_. Helena wishes she had her teeth back, so she could rip them open. Helena wishes, more than anything, that Sarah had just come home.

\--

Helena got caught in a net once. Sarah bit her free, hands petting Helena’s hair down over and over again.

“You’re alright,” she’d said.

“We’re alright,” she’d said.

“Don’t ever scare me like that again, got it?” she’d said. “It’s just you and me, shellbrain. You leave me, I got nothin’.”

“I wouldn’t leave you,” Helena said. “Ever. Not ever.”

She never made Sarah make the same promise. Stupid.

\--

Helena puts nets on her body. Helena learns the rock-words for _sister_. Helena walks on her bleeding terrible feet further and further away from the sea.

The water inland tastes wrong, terrible, like dark earth. Helena bites her lip until it bleeds, but the blood lies dead in the water and doesn’t taste like any sort of beginning at all.

\--

She woke up and Sarah was gone. Just gone. Helena couldn’t taste her in the water, couldn’t feel her breaking up the currents. She called Sarah’s name but the echoes were no answer. She swam in circles and Sarah wasn’t in them. Gone. Gone. Gone.

“I’m going to run away,” Sarah had said. _Run_ has a funny little trill on it, like the moment your head breaks out of the water and the sun blinds you. It sounds like that. Helena had propelled herself upwards and looked at the shoreline. It had looked back at her, every inch of it trilling with the word _run_.

\--

In a town in the shadow of a mountain there are stories about a girl with a strange accent and hands with no calluses on them. She’d come looking for work, they say. She’d come looking for _men_ , they say.

And so Helena learns there are other things to do with men, besides eat them. She thinks about Sarah in the water. She thinks about Sarah watching men drown, disappointed in them for not wanting her back.

Helena is hungry all the time, away from the sea, but her teeth are too blunt for it. She asks for meat and they give it to her, and then they give her teeth you can hold in your hand and tells her that this is enough. It is not enough. Her stomach grinds itself to death underneath her ribs, and she hushes it. When Helena finds Sarah and brings her home, they’ll hunt a shark and eat it. Helena will save the eyes for Sarah. The way they give up, sigh, pop between the teeth. Sarah always liked the soft parts best.

She finds the door that has behind it Sarah. She knocks on the door with her hand and its knuckles. Sarah opens the door.

“Oh,” she says, the word falling between them like a stone. Outside of the water, Helena doesn’t recognize her voice at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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